Intel launched its new Core i7 975 Extreme on the first day of Computex and now it’s time to put this über processor through its paces.
The old Core i7 965 Extreme has a clock speed of 3.2GHz (24 x 133MHz) and the new 975 Extreme runs a tad faster, 3.33GHz (25 x 133MHz), so we’re looking at a four per cent increase in …

COMMENTS

Looks nice............

All true but you forgot something ...

You neglected to mention the one major difference in the Extreme Edition i7. The 965 and the 975 have unlocked multipliers unlike the entire rest of the i7 range. This makes overclocking ridiculously simple and safe rather than messing about with ram voltages and cpu voltages and the black art of timings and core speeds. Oh, and yes, I bought one!

Great Review.

Overclocking Core i7

It's true that you can raise the base clock multiplier with the Extreme 965/975 and that does indeed make overclocking very, very easy but raising the 133MHz base clock speed on a 920 is child's play and delivers identical results.

I'm in the thick of a piece on DDR3 and Core i7 and the only way you'll have a problem overclocking the 920 is if you have really cack memory that won't run faster than 1200MHz or 1300MHz as the memory may restrict the base clock speed.

LOVE IT!

@PhilW

Are you seriously suggesting that a couple of extra hundred stable megahertz - at best, from what I have seen - are worth the £500 extra for an Extreme pocessor?

You either have no concept of value for money, or are a loony.

That said, I do wish I had waited a bit for i7 prices to come down before I built my Q6600 box - you can get a 920 D0 and all the kit to slap it in an existing box [IE chassis, PSU, HDD, GPU] for under £600.

And it comes OC'd to 4.0ghz on air out of the box. And it *still* costs less than a single 965/975 Extreme CPU, by a margin of a decent high range GPU, like a GTX285.

Basically, for the price of an Extreme CPU, you can actually build an entire high end machine providing you have a PSU and HDD spare...[who needs a chassis?]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-003-OB

I'm sure the parts could be picked up cheaper, but thats just an example.

OC'ing the 920 takes a bit of doing.

.. but there are very good guides online that tell you exactly what to do. The OC'ing community is really helpful and friendly to newbies too.

I managed to get the 920 on my main rig running at 4 ghz stable. Didn't want to risk pushing it any further than that.

As for how it runs, think "bat out of hell".. I have the thing churning out HD video renders 5 times as fast as my old Q6600, there's a big difference between "wait for 5 hours" and "wait for 1 hour" when it comes to that sort of work.

bar graphs

@Steven Raith

> Are you seriously suggesting that a couple of extra hundred stable megahertz - at best, from

> what I have seen - are worth the £500 extra for an Extreme processor?

Steven, nowhere did I suggest that it was actually WORTH the money. My only comment was that there IS a minor difference between the 920 and the 975 that wasn't mentioned. As to why I bought one ... well, I'll ask my psychologist about that.

(Actually I'm convinced that with the watercooling I'm employing and some combination multiplier and other overclocking tweaks then I can far exceed the possibilities of the 920 with the 975 but it's a bit of a gamble and it's distinctly possible I'll fail.)

@PhilW

Damn, no bitey ;-)

To be fair, if you are running [good] water cooling then it will probably go usefullyt further than a 920 - but even if I had a hypothetical £2k to wang on a rig, I still think that, say, three or four high end GPUs SLI/Crossfired up would make more of a difference than the Extreme. especially once the OpenCL-esque code starts appearing in a couple of years for GPGPU tasking - such as on Snow Leper, er, Leopard, etc.

That said, if I had £3k to spend...well, you're then in the position to start being a badge snob, and I'm always a sucker for that if I can when it comes to tech kit....

power draw? who cares?

I am sure that sounds very mean spirited and anti-earth, but who is reading these evaluations? Dell? HP? Nooooo, people who are going to build a few machines at best and likely only 1, this year. They want maximum smoke ... as in speed.